PRAGOTI

I agree with the author. The most important problem is waste. Nuclear waste is dangerous for thousands to millions of years, depending on the isotope, but most storage solutions are at best for maybe one hundred years. Such storage solutions are merely shifting the problem to another generation.

The reviewer is also correct. Capitalists are producing such waste because it is profitable to produce the commodity that this waste is a by-product of. A Marxist answer cannot lie in the waste. The author collapses the distinction in his model.

Engels wrote in The Part Played By Labour In the Transition From Ape To Man:

As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account…What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees – what cared they that heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, most tangible result, and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite opposite in character.

Eram